Your customers; getting started
Know thine customer
The way we read online has changed significantly since the time when seizure-inducing banners were the norm. "I think people do a lot less reading, and they do a lot more skimming," says David Clarke, managing partner of BGT Partners. This skimming behavior means a lot of us can simply filter out the banners on a given web page.
"We don't have TiVo for the web yet, but people have it in their heads," says Patrick Young, co-founder of Jetset Studios. Thus, it's an advertiser's worst nightmare: banner-blindness. And that means no clickthrough. Plus, back in the day, people browsed more leisurely, and ads had a little more time to stick. Now, advertisers only have moments -- no more than a few seconds -- to grab a person's attention online.
The starting line
So, with such a dismissive audience, where does a poor creative exec start? First of all, remember that online banners can be unique. "You have a medium that can entertain, can achieve results, can reward users, can create loyalty and can generate revenue off a banner," according to Shervin Samari, executive creative director at Omelet. "And it would be a shame if they just take a print ad and put it on a banner and moved some of the type around."
When starting a campaign for a new client, Clarke at BGT Partners says marketers need to consider the goal of the client. Is the company trying to drive sales of a product? Inform the audience of new features? Raise brand awareness?
Reid Carr, president of Red Door Interactive, says that creating a direct response banner ad means finding the right elements for a given brand, arranging them in a graphically pleasing way and then testing multiple versions until you find what works. But when creating ads designed to boost brand awareness, he says, you need to focus far more on the emotional content of the banner. But regardless of the company's goal, there are a few through lines to remember. "What we're trying to do is complement the experience, complement the feeling, create a visual perception of quality," Carr says.
Julie Hatlem, creative executive at Ovation Marketing, adds, "We have to make sure our message is simple and clear. You don't have a lot of time in this environment to catch their attention, so keeping it clear and concise is important."
